After the debacle of the 2007-2008 credit crunch of the banks, myself and few others expected the banks and government to return to some sense of responsible policy..

The problem as we all know was caused by excessive credit growth, excessive gearing and irresponsible lending to those who could not afford to repay what they borrowed.

I was amazed to see recently in the spring of 2014 that Halifax bank were advertizing 5% mortgages on TV.

This is certainly a huge contributing factor behind the recent price inflation in East London properties, together with the lack of supply. I was told recently that East London property is being directly marketed to Chinese and Japanese businesses, and remember a statement made by one of the interviewed traders in the Market Wizards book. He said that when the Japanese start buying things they buy it all, and do not understand why the prices go up so fast. Not understanding that they themselves are making the prices go up.

Addiction to credit is still with us and does not look to be leaving anytime soon.

The world seems to have gone a bit mad?

Sometimes in these socio-economic situations we are all co-erced by the media and by the commonly accepted understanding of a given problem to think about it in just one way. Sometimes there is an \'elephant in the room\'. At a later stage, such things seem all too readily apparent but when one is caught up in the zeitgeist one can easily miss the obvious. We are told that what we face in London is a housing crisis which is due to a shortage of supply. If one gives the situation even a moments thought though, another way of looking at it becomes quite obvious. We are not suffering from a shortage of supply but from overpopulation. This is a problem that will not go away no matter how many houses we build. This is not a call to the usual nonsensical xenophobic approaches but simply making the general point that the problem is primarily caused by having far too many buyers and not enough sellers. The effects of such overpopulation are, of course, experienced in many other areas too - education, healthcare, etc - yet this particular elephant remains unseen and the problem unaddressed.

Give me that credit - used properly it is just another type of \'supply\' to my business. Speaking purely from an investors standpoint. Some people will always get burned if they don\'t do their homework when buying into property. Market inflation may have been rocketing but strip out inflation and you are only looking at a +5% increase on pre-2008 London prices. Leverage out of London now to take advantage and stock up on that cash buffer.

I see the point, it is easy to look at trough to peak price increases instead of peak to peak increases. I noticed a lot of inflation in the price of a frozen chicken from Morrisons from £3.75 to £5.25 which seemed to happen overnight around the time of the QE in the UK. What is the logic behind leveraging out of London? Any "hot areas" in mind? What makes you think other areas will outperform London? As usually we only tend to get real booms in cities and the rest of the country plays catch up in a slower and lesser fashion. I have been investigating some unusual land and farm types of properties and they are surprisingly cheap compared to city prices, problem is finding a good enough reason that indicates some upside in price is coming apart from the usual adding value by way of renovating them that we English usually do.